Not Again!

It was only a couple weeks ago that I wrote about a Chinese zoo accused of letting 11 rare siberian tigers starve to death. If that wasn't bad enough, a mass grave containing the remains of "more than 30 animals, including rare white tigers and lions" was discovered at a different Chinese zoo. The likely cause of death was, once again, malnutrition.

They Starved to Death

They weren't even buried, just dumped in an open pit:

The bones and remains of a quantity of animals could be seen poking through the snow In a three-metre deep pit near the Harbin Northern Forest Zoo, in Heilongjiang province in northeast China, state media reported.

They included two white tigers, five white lions, two leopards and five other big cats that had died in early 2008, zoo staff told a Chinese reporter.

Also believed to be buried in the mass grave were two of the zoo's three Asian elephants and 28 of its 29 endangered great bustards. (source)

Even the animals that haven't died are suffering from malnutrition and aren't being fed the proper quality of food that is required to keep them healthy. Even extremely rare and valuable Golden Monkeys are only being fed 3 types of fruits instead of the 6 recommended.

But the most shocking thing is that there's very probably some tiger bone smuggling going on behind all this. The journalist who wrote this piece was offered tiger-bone-tonic for 2,800 yuan (£280) a bottle...